Tag: email notifications

How often do you feel like a hamster running on a wheel, working hard but never making forward progress? Your problem is your priorities. Not knowing what needs to be done now, what can wait until later, and what shouldn’t be done at all puts you in an endless cycle of struggling your way out of a hole that keeps getting deeper.

Last week we looked at a psychological phenomenon called decision fatigue and discussed how it can cause us to make poor choices or avoid making choices altogether. More specifically, we dove into how decision fatigue can freeze us when it comes to cleaning out our homes and our inboxes. (You can read that article here.)

Whether we’re talking about physical objects, digital information, or anything in between, decluttering is, at its core, the act of repeatedly deciding how to process our possessions. Because of this, it can be a mentally exhausting endeavor; but also because of this, we can apply a similar set of overarching practices for preventing and purging our messes, both online and off. Here’s how.

Email can be both a blessing and a curse. Let’s aim for the former by learning from those who do it best:

“I have a two-minute rule that says: If you determine an action can be done in two minutes, you actually should do it right then because it’ll take longer to organize it and review it than it would be to actually finish it the first time you notice it,”

Turn them off on your phone, tablet and computer. Allowing every email that arrives in your inbox to interrupt your day destroys your productivity. The amount of time you’ll waste on unimportant interruptions will add up. Here’s how to do it.